Preparing for an open house without a checklist can be a challenge. There are dozens of tasks to take care of before the first visitors set foot in the house that you’re showing off. Without an open house checklist, it’s easy to let important preparations slip through the cracks.
In this article, we’re going to share with you our preparing for an open house checklist. We’ll walk you through every item in the checklist and share resources to help you carry out each point. Let’s get to it!
1. Share News About the Open House on Your Social Media Profiles
If you use social media to advertise listings, you can also use it to promote open house events. Ideally, you’ll share the news about the open house at least one week or two in advance so your followers can plan ahead and set time aside to visit:
That’s a template from the Jigglar archives that you can use to show pictures of properties with upcoming open house events. For this type of publication, we recommend that you share the details of the open house in the body of the post and stick with photographs for its image.
As your open house approaches, we recommend that you re-share that publication using stories if you’re on Instagram or Facebook. That way, you’ll be able to remind followers about the event without creating new post.
2. Distribute Open House Flyers in Your Target Neighborhood
Flyers are fantastic way to let neighbors know about upcoming open houses without breaking the bank. It doesn’t cost a lot to print and distribute flyers en masse and they can help you drum up enthusiasm for the upcoming event:
The hardest part of creating an open house flyer is working on its design. Graphic design can be expensive and it can take a long time for a flyer to be ready.
Using Jigglar, you can get access to open house flyer templates like the one that you see above. You can customize any template that you want and have a flyer design ready to go in record time.
3. Offer a Virtual Open House Alternative
A lot of people might want to attend your open house but won’t be able to due to problems with their schedule or other limitations. That doesn’t mean that they should be left out of the fun, though.
By hosting a virtual open house, you increase your potential buyers list exponentially. You can give hundreds attendees a virtual tour of the house on a live event and even save that recording for others to see on your social media profiles.
For practical purposes, we recommend hosting your virtual and physical open house events on different dates. That way, you’ll be able to devote your full attention to each event.
4. Come Up With an Open House Follow Up Script
Hosting an open house is a critical part of the sales funnel, but in many cases, it’s not the last step. If you don’t get offers right away, we recommend that you follow up with attendees to see what they liked best about the event.
An open house feedback survey will let you collect data to help you improve future events. Moreover, you can use that survey to see which attendees are interested in the property and follow up with them using a prepared script.
5. Prepare an Open House Register Form
If you want to be able to follow up with the people that attend your open house, you’re going to need a sign-in sheet. That’s a simple paper or digital form that visitors can sign in with when they get to the open house:
The primary purpose of an open house sign in sheet is to help you collect contact information for everyone that attends the event. That information will help you when it comes to sending follow up surveys and follow up scripts.
You don’t need to get fancy when it comes to your sign-in sheet’s design. For most events, you can get away with using that Jigglar template that you see in the example above. Just make sure to add your own logo and you’re good to go.
Conclusion
Preparing for an open house involves a lot more work than just making sure the property is clean and ready to be seen. You also need to publicize the event using flyers and social media, so you can ensure as many people as possible visit during that day.
On top of that, we recommend offering virtual house tour alternatives. You also want to make sure that you have a follow-up script ready to go and that you collect contact information for everyone that attends the open house.
Do you have any questions about our preparing for an open house checklist? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
